Design Derby

“Frankly, there’s a disconnect here—beautiful object, function confused, and really high price,” Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, said one recent morning. She was addressing two men at a table in a MOMA conference room. “It’s a bedside light, but it blinds you—it’s super bright.” Paolo Bertocchi and Matteo De Colle, the Williamsburg-based designers of the piece—called the Face Value lamp—stared sheepishly at their creation, a galvanized-iron utility box with two piercing L.E.D. lights for eyes and an on/off switch as its mouth.

Calvin Tsao, an architect, weighed in. “People might think, I could put that together at Home Depot,” he said. Antonelli added, “Which is usually what happens when you position something as art: ‘My child could have done that.’ ”

“I guess you could design sunglasses for these,” Tsao went on. Other people at the table laughed, a bit cruelly.

“We’re not buying that,” Antonelli declared, after the duo slunk out.

This was not an art-school critique or a reality-TV takedown. It was a meeting of a design jury, convened to select new products for the MOMA gift shop. More than a thousand local designers had responded to an open call last spring; the finalists were presenting their wares to a panel that would determine which would end up in the junk pile and which would be stocked on shelves alongside modern design’s greatest hits.

Among the products the judges accepted were the Blokket, a cell-phone case woven with signal-blocking silver threads, for people who have trouble powering down; the Amplifiear, a saucer-shaped plastic speaker that clips onto an iPad; the Domino Effect Domino game, featuring the flags of countries in economic crisis; and the Egg Blanket, a baby mat resembling an oversized fried egg. Nixed submissions included a magnetic cutting board shaped like a meat cleaver and a flat-packed Snug-It! stool, to be assembled without nails.

Back in the pitch room, a designer named Greig Bennett, who wore Nantucket-red pants, passed around a postcard-size magnet, emblazoned with the words “Greetings from the Bronx” over an illustration of the borough’s landmarks.

“People have a negative stereotype of the Bronx,” Bennett said. “They think of burning buildings, or they think of the crack epidemic, or of how far it is from the rest of New York, which is not true.”

“I want to see what else you have, not for tourists,” Antonelli said. “We always have to have some touristy pieces, but . . . .”

“I think it’s interesting to put a light on the Bronx,” Tsao interrupted.

“Maybe we don’t have to pick up the mantle of all the underappreciated boroughs at once,” Tsao said.

Rama Chorpash, the director of product design at Parsons, arrived to introduce his entry, the Spiraloop. It is a stainless-steel potato masher, produced by a family-owned spring company in Brooklyn.

“So I’m going to lead you through the world of springmaking,” Chorpash began. “It was one of the largest industries in the United States in the nineteenth century, and part of my project is to re-nobilize it.” Chorpash said that he would continue his research while on sabbatical: “I’m looking at what I call ‘stand-alone manufacturing’—say, a metal spinner that used to make a part for a milk truck can no longer make a part for a milk truck—and then imagining utopic visions for what it can make.”

The panelists were enthralled. “Of course, a potato masher is sort of a dumb object,” Chorpash muttered.

“Reversing the process is always so interesting,” Tsao said, ignoring Chorpash’s comment. “I mean, the best chefs go to the greenmarket to see what’s fresh, but we are so egocentric about design—it’s always I want to make something. When industries are dying because they don’t have the imagination to revitalize themselves, we, as designers, can be catalysts to reanimate these companies.”

The panel nodded appreciatively for the utopic promise of the potato masher. “Besides, it’s a gorgeous object that I could see having in the kitchen,” Antonelli said. It will be available at MOMA in May, for thirty-eight dollars. ♦

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